Testimonies at the HRC
Oral History Project
In 1982, the Holocaust Resource Center launched an oral history project to gather and preserve first-person eyewitness accounts, resulting in a unique collection of more than 200 original oral histories from local Holocaust survivors, rescuers, and liberators.
The testimonies provide historical context about Jewish life in prewar Europe, the events of the Holocaust, and rebuilding community after genocide. By critically engaging with these narratives, they help us build imperative connections between the antisemitism and persecution experienced by Europe’s Jews, and recent incidents of injustice, displacement, and genocide in the 21st century.
Today, these oral history collections are associated with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and Yale University in New Haven, CT. A number of the oral histories are featured in the Kean University Library’s digital repository; all are available for viewing at the HRC.
In 2010, Rabbi Joseph J. Preil, Ph.D. z”l, Kean University professor and founding director of the Holocaust Resource Center, edited the volume, Holocaust Testimonies: European Survivors and American Liberators in New Jersey (Rutgers University Press), based on these testimonies.
News & Events
A Shock and a Miracle’: Kean Oral History Project Changes History for Family
A New Jersey family’s personal history has been rewritten after taking part in the Holocaust Resource Center of Kean University’s Oral History Project.
They learned that a beloved uncle they believed had been murdered in Poland at the start of World War II was actually alive until at least 1943.
Peter Goldsmith, 87, recorded his testimony in September 2021 for the Oral History Project at Kean, a collection of first-hand accounts of Holocaust survivors, rescuers and liberators. Goldsmith’s is the first new oral history added since the 1990s.
